


Hunger

by needleyecandy



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-29
Updated: 2014-08-29
Packaged: 2018-02-15 05:27:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2217453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/needleyecandy/pseuds/needleyecandy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Chitauri home world is running out of food. When Thanos comes with promises of a new world, one filled with enemies to eat, they have no choice but to follow him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hunger

**Author's Note:**

> This just popped into my head after I watched The Avengers last night, when the Chitauri struck me as being ant-like. The proofreading was *very* perfunctory, feel free to point out typos. Enjoy!

My name is 908-4. I was the fourth of my clutch to hatch. I remember smashing at the shell, fighting for air, and then the guardians were there, clicking fondly at me. "She'll be a strong one," they said about me. It took two more days for the rest of us to emerge. The queen came to see us, once we were all out.

"My daughters," she said, "your clutch has no special number, and you will be dedicated to no special task, as some clutches are, but you mean no less to me."

That was the only time I met my mother.

We ate her nectar, though, until we were old enough to eat the meat of our enemies. Once we had been weaned, 908 was assigned to be warriors. Though there was little fighting, we learned, as we made our empty patrols. Our rocky island had been almost cleared of enemies, and soon there would be no more meat. It was frightening; when that happened, our queen would take her drones and fly away to a new island, lay new clutches to eat the enemies there. And it was whispered that there were few islands left without Chitauri already on them; she might have to fight another queen for a new land. We could not fly; we could not follow her and help her. We would be left behind, however much we meant to her, and there would be no meat left to us but each other.

There were stories of this happening before; clutches turned against each other where they had once been allied, and finally, clutchmate devouring clutchmate. It was the way of the world. But it did not mean we felt anything but dread at the thought.

So when Thanos came to our queen with the promise of a world full of meat, she was an answer to our prayers. (No, no, I must say _he_ , not _she_ ; we had been warned more than once to say he, though we did not understand. A male has only one use, and with no wings, Thanos was not good even for that. Yet Thanos seemed good for us. But he said _I am a he_ , so we say _he_.) He said he only needed time to plan. So we brought him meat and gave him time.

And then one day, patrolling alone, I found the body. It was soft and pink: someone had peeled off her shell and left her dead on the rocks. It was a shocking violation; we might eat one another when we had to, but to leave someone unshelled was truly unthinkable. I struggled to not be sick as I moved closer to investigate. Her body was sickeningly warm, like bodies only are when they have been in the sun too long. Not cold, like we were supposed to be. She was probably beginning to go bad. But meat was meat, so I sighed and picked her up to take back to the hive.

Halfway back, she moved. I dropped her, stunned that she could live thus. She stood up and looked around, eyes frantic. "Where am I?" she asked.

"This is... here," I said. We had no other name for our home. It was simply home. "How do you survive like this?" I asked her.

"I'm rather wondering that myself," she said. "I fell so long..." she looked down at her body. "My clothes have rotted off."

"Clothes?" I said, curious. I did not know the word.

"My outer layer." She gestured with her hands across her body.

"Oh, your shell," I corrected gently.

"Not exactly."

She was confused. But who could blame her, after what she'd been through? "I must take you to the hive. The caretakers there will be able to help you."

Before we got to the caretakers, though, Thanos saw us. I had never spoken to him before, and I was a little awed. He nodded at me as a sharp grin split his face. "This one is just what I need," he told me, and he took the wrist of the unshelled one in his hand and pulled her away. He took her into his rooms, where we had been told not to go. We heard her screaming for months on end, but it was not something we could worry over. If the unshelled one might help, she had to be made to do it. Each day there was less meat, and if Thanos did not come up with an answer soon, we would be abandoned. Perhaps this was why her shell had been taken, to make her easier to persuade.

And then one day he came out of his rooms with the unshelled one. She was not pink, anymore, she was green and purple and red, and she looked even worse than the day I found her. Her eyes were more wild and her gestures sharp and scattered. "This is Loki," Thanos told us. "He will lead you to invade Midgard, where you will eat your fill. I must only gather the other colonies, so that all the Chitauri may fight and feast together. There will be no more wars among you for land once Midgard is subdued. Loki will be king over the Midgardians and your colonies will be free to eat your fill."

Loki (another wingless male, we were expected to believe, though I did not) looked sharply at Thanos at these words, but said nothing.

Thanos took Loki with him when he went, leaving us plans for flying machines that we were to build; there were small ones for each of us to ride as we attacked, and we were expected to make one section of a great sky ship. We also had to make suits, which he said would keep us safe from the foul air of Midgard. The sky ship would send power to our suits, and once we had taken Midgard we could build safe domes to live in, only going out to gather more meat.

We waited a long time for them to come back. People began to die of hunger as we waited. My best friend, 908-223, collapsed one day as we patrolled together, and she did not get up. We had spent every day of our eight long months together. I carried her body back to the hive. The queen clicked sadly, but she ate. Meat is meat, daughter or no.  
When Thanos came back, he was alone. Loki had gone ahead, he said, to decide where we would make our first attack. Thanos said it would be soon, and ordered us to reduce patrol time to put more work towards the things we were meant to build. It did not matter; there were no enemies left to catch and eat, no reason to patrol.

The other colonies came to us; apparently our island was near the center. They flew in on their machines, wearing their suits for lack of other ways to carry them. The queens pulled with them their sections of the sky ship. The drones flew alongside, trying to look useful, though they were not.

We assembled the sections and said goodbye to our island. It would have been hard to leave home, but for the thought of the meat that awaited us. Everyone got inside the ship and sat in our ranks, watching out the portals as we rose into the sky and between the stars, leaving behind everything we had ever known.

Thanos sat in the room at the front, staring at a point in the void. Hours passed, and then the order came to move to the bays. We filed down to the bottom level of the ship, a great floor covered in our flying machines. They waited for us in neat lines. We activated our safety suits and seated ourselves. The great bay door opened and as one, we moved forward. We now faced the same point as Thanos, and we hovered in the nothingness, waiting for we knew not what.

But when it came, we knew. There was a patch that moved, like ripples in the vacuum, and then it glimmered, and then it opened, and through the hole we could see another world. We moved towards it. Despite my suit, I held my breath as I went through the portal.

It was bright, so bright. It hurt my eyes and made me angry that our suits might protect our lungs but not our eyes.

They must have been waiting for us, because one of them attacked us immediately. She was red and had a blank face and flew without wings. She was small for a queen, but we quickly decided she could be nothing else. And she was strong. She shot fire at us and she could take turns more sharply than our flying machines, and I watched many of my friends die within seconds of coming into our new world.

More of us made it through, though, and we dove, attacking the workers who swarmed on the ground. They were shelless, like Loki. Did only their queen have a shell? We were pleased. This meat would not even require cracking to eat. Most of us focused our attacks on the queen; she was the one we needed to conquer if we were to take this world. I flew past a tall, strange stone hill-thing, where Loki fought a worker. She was a huge one with a partial shell. She looked stronger, but I did not care about Loki. I cared about killing their queen and installing ours in her place.

I felt a thrill of pride as the first queen came sweeping in. She was strong, so strong she could breathe in the Midgard air. Our queens rarely fight, and it was glorious to watch, to see her huge body as she swirled gracefully between the stone things and knocked them down. She came from an island with no metal, so her children had no flying machines. Instead they jumped from her body, sliding down stone to kill more workers on the ground.

The ones who were black with brown or pink heads fought back against us. These had to be their warriors, on patrol as I used to do. I shot my hot darts at them. Now that there were more of them to fight, we had to be more careful in our attacks if we did not want to become meat for Midgard. We soon realized how weak these fighters were; only a few seemed to have any ability to hurt us. So we watched our queen as she hunted down theirs, who simply fled before her in terror. I had never felt so alive as at that moment. And then her movement stuttered, and she curled forward. I could not see what stopped her, but her shell - her lovely shell, covered in spines in which her daughters could shelter - cracked open, and their puny queen shot into her, right in, and she _exploded._  We screamed our rage. I had never known such pain in my life.

But then we saw the most glorious sight. _All_ the queens came through the portal, one after the other. We flung ourselves back into battle with renewed vigor. Another queen died, but after the shock of the first one, we were better prepared to keep fighting through it. Many more of us died in pursuit of their small red one, but we fell back and laughed as we saw what she was doing. She was flying upwards, alone, towards the portal. She was abandoning her world to invade ours. Where she would find no meat, and where she had no drones. She would die alone on our empty world.

And then there was a flash from the portal.

The power to my suit died. My lungs filled with the toxic air. It burned my throat, my lungs, and then there was searing everywhere as the poison filtered into my blood. And then I knew no more.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  



End file.
